Views on the News

Views on the News*

May 21, 2016

The fact that Donald Trump is the Republican presumptive
nominee and Bernie Sanders is still chugging along in the Democrat primary means
only one thing: Voters are pissed off.With 94 million
Americans out of the workforce, middle class voters seeing wages decline, and
the average college graduate facing $35,000 in student loan debt with few job
prospects, it is no wonder people are so angry.These disaffected voters could be
Hillary Clinton's undoing and propel Trump to the White House.Clinton is facing a big problem. The
"us vs. them" populist messages
of political outsiders Trump and Sanders have been music to the ears of so many
Americans. They want to blow up the
system Clinton has helped create and the system they believe has failed them. A nationwidePew Research studyfinds that middle class America is
shrinking and wages are declining.The
report finds that more than four-fifths of America's metropolitan areas have
seen household incomes decline this century. Only 39 out of 229 metro areas saw medium
household incomes grow. The cities
hardest hit are located in key electoral states like Michigan and Ohio, which
could prove to be politically problematic for Clinton. Her unlikable
personality and tone-deaf comments like "we're going to put a lot of coal
miners and coal companies out of business" will not earn her any brownie
points with these voters.Her
position on trade could end up hurting her with the working class voters who
agree with Trump and Sanders that bad trade deals are hurting American workers.Even more
problematic for Clinton is that 44% of Sanders voters said they would vote for
Trump, while only 23% said they would vote for her, and 32% would vote for
neither.Exit polling from
Michigan, another important swing state that Clinton embarrassingly lost,
showed the same problem for her. Blue-collar workers aren't the only ones who feel left behind by this economy.Whether it is the jobless college
graduate who can't find work or the African-American who is facing an
unemployment rate that is twice as high as that for Caucasians, Trump has an
opportunity to tap into the frustrations of Americans in a way that Clinton
cannot.Republicans
face a daunting electoral map, but Clinton is a uniquely unappealing candidate
and Trump has already tapped into the disaffected voters who could help tip
the balance of the 2016 election in his favor.

Many critics of Donald Trump's presidential run have
likened it to that of his predecessor, America's historic first Fraud in Chief,Barack Obama.One of the defining peculiarities of Trump's success so far
is that a populist movement inconceivable except as a reaction to the fallout
of Obama's fundamental transformation of America actually echoes Obama's own
strategy and substance in so many ways. Trump's followers have
chosen to aggressively conceal and deny it.First, the
rap sheet on President Obama: Though he is a
doctrinaire progressive according to his public record and past statements, he
tries to evade this label during a presidential campaign. Being
unprincipled and unscrupulous, he is willing to pursue his longstanding
progressive aims – e.g., socialized medicine,amnestyfor illegal immigrants, government
manipulation of the economy and vital industries, pragmatically and by
increments, while publicly pretending not to favor those more extreme goals.He belongs to
the secular liberal faction on social issues. In truth, he
vehemently defends Planned Parenthood against those who would cut off its
federal funding. He criticizes those who oppose preferential treatment
for men who like to dress up as women and use girls' bathrooms, on which issue
he is allied with the influential progressive young guns of the tech world,
including even PayPal founderPeter
Thiel, a prominent "LGBT rights" activist.
From these associations and many others, it is clear that he has
consistently used his public voice and position to accelerate the anti-family vulgarization
of societal norms regarding sexual behavior, marriage and family, public
decency, and personal modesty.He instinctively favors using executive fiats to achieve his
personal agenda in defiance of the principle of separation of powers, and he
prefers economic and political solutions grounded in government intervention
and personal bias to those that rely on the social and economic benefits of
unfettered liberty.He has a
general propensity to view his public position as license to pontificate about
any issue on which he believes his special brand of progressive pomposity is
called for. He perceives Middle America, rural
citizens, and in general those not conforming to the progressive sensibilities
of Big City USA (aka New York, Chicago, and L.A.) as poorly educated,
mean-spirited, and unsophisticated. In fact, though framing his
successful primary campaign as the triumph of an inexperienced outsider facing
down the Washington machine, he has since been fully revealed, to the
consternation of the rational minority of his early apologists, to be right at
home in the world of crony capitalism, global lobbyists, and the kabuki theater
of establishment politics.He smears political opponents who refuse to submit to the
protocols of the progressive establishment's elitist collegiality as
unlikeable, "heartless" cranks. He threatens to employ
the executive branch's bloated power as his personal weapon to intimidate or
restrict opponents, such as unfriendlymedia
voicesand private entities whose
business decisions he dislikes. He considers the Tea Party movement an
enemy force, speaks out against its members, and has a consistentrecordof supporting overt and covert efforts
to crush or undermine it.In conjunction with friendly factions within the media, he systematically,
and apparently with no qualms of conscience, invents and perpetuates false
narratives and bald-faced lies to misrepresent himself and his past, to
discredit his opponents, or to protect himself from legitimate scrutiny or
criticism. He favorspunishingbusinesses that do not play by
arbitrary rules governed only by his personal notions of "fairness" and "justice"; he supports leftist policies that
directly violate core principles of freedom and property rights, such as the
minimum wage andaffirmative
action; and in the face of hard economic times, he knee-jerkinglyproposesto subsidize or even nationalize
industries he deems essential. He leads a
populist movement that openly rejects the republican restraints entrenched in
the U.S. Constitution in favor of unrestrained deference to the leader's
personal charisma and advocacy – i.e., demagoguery and tyranny.
Much of his rhetoric is cynically calculated to divide Americans into warring
factions along economic, class, and racial lines in order to exploit the
resultingangerand distrust. That then is Barack
Obama. Now let's turn to Donald Trump...oh,
wait. ThatwasTrump!

Nothing is too big to fail, including civilizations, and
ours is no exception.The tendency is to take for granted the benefits, rights and
privileges that have been painfully won in the past and gradually squandered in
the present.The most
evident sign of civilization devolution is the inability or unwillingness to
acknowledge reality, to come to terms with things as they are, and to oppose
the suppression of objectivity and its substitution by fantasy, illusion and
wish-fulfillment. The West is now busy at work across the entire field of
social, cultural and political life promoting its own version of Lysenkoism, a misconceived exercise of supposedly vernalizing reality by transforming fact into fantasy and
truth into lie for the purpose of creating the perfect society and the redeemed
human being, transferable across the generations.Its assumptions about the world are
guided not by common sense or genuine science but by the precepts of ideology
and political desire.Examples
abound of the ubiquitous tendency to replace ontology with myth, the
determinate with the fluid and the objective with the delusionary. Some
representative examples might include:

·The demonstrable failure of socialism wherever
it has been tried is proof that it has not been properly implemented.

·Democratic Israel is an apartheid state.

·Islam with its record of unstinting bloodshed is
a religion of peace.

·Illegal immigrants are undocumented workers.

·Terrorism is workplace violence.

·A child in the womb is a mass of insensible
protoplasm.

·The killing of the old and the ill is merciful,
even when the recipient of such tender concern is not consulted.

·There is no such thing as truth, an axiom
regarded as true.

·Green energy is a social and economic good irrespective
of crony profiteering, exorbitant cost, wildlife devastation, and unworkability in its present state.

·Storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods,
tsunamis and mortality itself are natural phenomena, but Nature, which cares
nothing for human life, is nonetheless sacred, vulnerable and at the mercy of
human indifference.

·Women are disadvantaged in the workforce,
academia and society at large despite high-end hiring practices, legal
judgments, custody protocols and university appointments, as well as student
enrollment, favor women to the detriment of men.

·An enemy is a friend.

·Criminality is innocence.

·Losing is winning.

·Prosperity is avarice.

·Redistributing wealth, i.e., robbing the
affluent and productive, is a form of compassion and basic justice.

·Those who claim victim status are always
credible.

·Accumulating debt is an economic stimulus.

·Big government is a boon to mankind.

·War ispassé(so 19thcentury).

·Diplomacy and talk—the higher
Twitter—will prevail over barbarism.

·The most gynocentric
society ever created is a rape culture.

·Palestine is a historically legitimate nation.

·Uniformity of thought and action equals cultural
diversity.

·An exploded lie merely confirms what it lies about (e.g.,RigobertaMenchu).

·Morality is relative.

·Merit is an unearned distinction.

Or in other words, what is, is not,
and what is not, is.This species of Orwellian inversion, supplanting the
real by the imaginary, is now an intrinsic component of the Western psyche and
firmly embedded in what French thinker Pierre Bourdieu
in his influential treatiseDistinctioncalls the socialhabitus, a system of norms, usages, taboos and conventions
that steer thought and behavior in certain approved directions and from which
individuals should strive to emancipate themselves. Biology,
Nature, economic forces and human nature are
not disposable artifacts, fashion accessories or hypothetical creations of
unanchored will that can be investigated, plumbed, to some limited degree
modified and harnessed to advantage, but they cannot be turned into
something they are not or conveniently abolished without unleashing tragic
consequences.

One of the most harmful and also false ideas that
liberals have introduced to American culture is the idea that gender is
nothing more than a “social construct.”Put another way,
there’s no real difference between men and women; we just think there are
differences because we accept illogical cultural norms that have been passed
down through the years.This
idea undergirds liberal feminism: if a man can do it, then a woman can do it
just as well, even if we’re talking about the military, firemen or being
a cop.t’s the core concept that allows liberals to
try to present transgenderism as a civil rights issue
instead of a mental health issue. Undoubtedly, it’s also part of the
reason you see so many sad, lost, nearly androgynous young men these days.The sleight of
hand that liberals use to promote this obviously foolish idea is to point out
that different cultures have different definitions of what constitutes
manliness.If gender really
were merely social construct, we’d expect to see women making up the
majority of warriors, hunters and the people doing backbreaking, dangerous jobs
SOMEWHERE.Along the same lines,
there’s no culture where men do the majority of the child rearing.If gender is
really just a random, illogical series of habits that civilizations pick up,
then we SHOULD see a lot more overlap, but we don’t, and we never will.Part of this is based on the very
real physical differences between men and women.Men are taller, bigger, have more muscle
mass.In
violent confrontations with men or in tasks that require great strength, very
few women can hope to compete with even the average male.This is the same across all cultures and
it has helped create different incentives for men and woman.Men have been
and still are the ones who do dirty, dangerous and violent work. Men who
are good at it are admired by other men and sought out by women.Equivalently, women are admired for
their beauty and their feminine wiles.Again, this is something you’ll find across all cultures which
again shows you that gender is not a social
construct.Instead it’s an
outgrowth of biological reality.Convenient as it may be to liberalism to pretend that
there’s no difference between men and women, it’s not good for
society.

Even though the official unemployment rate fell below
5%, most of us who live in the real world know better: there are still
an estimated 30 million Americans who have either given up looking for work or
are underemployed.According to the latest Pew Research, the American middle
class has shrunk for the first time in decades and is no longer the economic
majority.We need to
honestly examine inner factors that hold American workers back:

·First, our education
system fails to produce a sufficiently educated workforce.Today the U.S. spends on average
$12,000 per pupil per year in K-12, one of the highest amounts in the world. U.S. students
score only “average,” according to the Program for International
Student Assessment (PISA) report. Reading
scores on the national NEAP test increased less than 1% between 1970 and 2012. Math scores on the same exam increased
2%.Our higher education system
doesn’t fare any better. About 45% of recent college graduates are
“underemployed,” holding jobs that typically do not require a
bachelor’s degree. The
long-term trend shows a mismatch between what students learn in school and the
skills and knowledge businesses need. Colleges and universities need to better
prepare our young people by closely linking future employment opportunities
with their current fields of study. We also need to have more vocational schools
that can teach young people employable skills. Anyone who is serious about helping workers
ought to support effective education reform to provide young people more
choices and real knowledge.

·The second factor
holding America back is our culture.We have experienced a cultural shift
to one that doesn’t appreciate physical work. Low-paying, labor-intensive jobs such as
picking fruit, slaughtering chickens, and housekeeping are not desirable to
even many of the poorest Americans. Despite farmers raising some wages more
than 20% and the youth unemployment rate being 12.2% in July 2015, few
Americans flock to farms. Research
shows that only 3% of Americans who work full time, year round, are in poverty.
So no weapon is more powerful to fight
the war on poverty than work, any kind of work. As a nation, we need to re-emphasize the
honor and dignity of work.

·The third factor that
holds American workers back is our welfare system.Our generous welfare benefits are
disincentives to work. ACato Institute study found that in
nine states, annual benefits were worth more than $35,000 a year. Welfare currently pays more than a
minimum-wage job in 34 states and the District of Columbia. In Hawaii, Massachusetts, Connecticut,
New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., welfare pays
more than a $20-an-hour job, and in five additional states it yields more than
a $15-per-hour job.Since the 2008
economic recession, the U.S. government has made it even easier for Americans
to sign up for welfare benefits. For example, eligibility rules for getting
food stamps were relaxed and work requirements were waived. Our generous welfare system and its
accessibility not only have incentivized workers not to work, but also have
created an unofficial minimum wage. Especially for entry-level positions,
they’re essentially imposing a drastic minimum wage hike—to at
least $20 an hour—for American businesses, because welfare recipients
have no incentive to take any job that pays less than their welfare benefits.

Education, culture, and welfare are not the only three
factors holding American workers back.Other factors, including ruinous
regulations, such as the occupational licensing requirements, harm employment
opportunities of American workers too. These factors have nothing to do with
immigration, but they contribute to our nation’s low labor participation
rate and the bleak employment picture in America. To help
American workers, we need to focus on addressing issues such as education
reform, culture change, welfare reform, and getting rid of ruinous anti-work
regulations.

There is so much
published each week that unless you search for it, you will miss important
breaking news.I try to package the
best of this information into my “Views on the News” each Saturday
morning.No updates have been made
this week to the issue sections.